Exam mode
You set the date. Micabo reorganizes everything.
Spaced repetition places each card at the last useful moment, indefinitely. It does not know there is an exam on the 14th. A card rated “easy” today leaves for three weeks, even if the test is in ten days, and it will not come back before.
Exam mode gives the scheduler what it is missing: a deadline, and the grade you are aiming for. You set exam day, it replans the deck around it.
October 2026
C
Slide to aim higher
Why a normal schedule gets trapped
A deck of two hundred cards in spaced review is perfect for continuous assessment and bad for a fixed date. Three things go wrong: some cards fall after the exam, others were never introduced, and the weakest ones come back too early to be useful on exam day.
The manual answer is to review the whole deck the night before. That is exactly what the method avoids: a session of three hundred cards in one evening leaves nothing the next day, and you know it before you start.
No card leaves past exam day
This is the rule that holds everything together, and it is more radical than it looks. During an active exam, the interval a card receives is capped at the exam date.
Without this cap, the first good answer undoes the plan: the card leaves for three weeks and drops out of view. With it, it comes back one last time before exam day. The intervals shown under the buttons are therefore shorter than usual, and the session says so at the top of the screen, otherwise you would think the scheduler was broken.
The plan, announced before it is applied
Micabo shows the projection before moving anything: how many cards are covered, how many passes are placed, over how many days. A replan you discover after the fact is a replan you undo.
The load tightens toward the end without stacking on the night before: the last passes spread over the last 3 days, staggered from one card to the next.
Every day carries named work
A plan that says “review for 30 minutes” is no different from a timer. Micabo's plan says what there is to do: a quiz on chapter 3, a mock exam, an explanation out loud, a day off. You open the app, and the day is already written.
- Mock exam on thermodynamicsMonday
- Quiz on chapter 3Tuesday
- Day offWednesday
- Explain the three laws out loudThursday
- Exam dayFriday
Three intensities, according to the grade you want
How many times each card should come back before the exam is not the same question for “I want to pass” and for “I want the top mark”. You set the target grade, Micabo derives the intensity:
- Light
- 2passes per card
- Normal
- 3passes per card
- Intensive
- 4passes per card
The grade scale follows the country you study in: a French 20, a Quebec 100 and a British A-Level do not compare, and a slider that would work everywhere would mean nothing anywhere.
Several exams, several courses
An exam covers the courses you give it, and a course can be in several exams. When two dates compete for the same card, the nearest one caps it: it is the first constraint, and honoring the second first would miss both.
What exam mode does not do
It does not manufacture time. Declaring an exam for tomorrow on two hundred new cards gives an honest and unsustainable plan, and Micabo shows it as it is rather than reassuring you.
It does not replace the method either: active recall and spacing do the work, exam mode only gives them a deadline. If you are coming from Anki, the comparison says exactly what changes.
Read next
The method
Rereading a course does not make it stick. What you retrieve from memory does, especially if the question comes back just before you forget. How Micabo applies spaced repetition, with the real intervals.
Micabo or Anki
Anki is open, proven, and excellent. Micabo writes the cards from your course and replans everything around an exam date. An honest comparison, including where Anki wins.
Drop a course, see what it becomes.
On the site and on iPhone, with the same account and the same plan.